Prelim Evaluation

Overall, I am extremely pleased with how this prelim task went. Our group worked really well together, with each of us having strong editing skills and creative thinking.
Initially, while we were unsure of which song to pick, I believe our choice was a good one as it involved applying more filming/editing skills than in previous tasks - for example, we had to do some minor set-making (as we needed to make a door which we could smash an ax through), which was not necessary for previous tasks.
However, while it was educationally valuable and fun to recreate this video, it did not show any lip-syncing, which would've been helpful in preparing us for when we filmed our own music videos. If I could choose a different video to replicate, I would choose one that showed the singer lip-syncing as this would've been more valuable in terms of preparation.

In order to plan our video, we watched the video multiple times and screen-shotted each separate scene and shot, saving them to my phone to look at during filming. While filming we also had the video playing, in order to act in time to certain parts of the song.

Planning the costumes was fairly easy, as I had the dungarees needed for the ax murderer and was able to quickly sew on a couple of straps to my own costume in order to make it look as accurate as possible. Josh and Jess had the clothes for their own costumes ready, so it was only the ax murderer that we needed to properly plan for (with the bandages around his head).
During planning I was only particularly worried about where we would source our ax - however, Jess then said she had one we could use. While this did initially present me with the worry of getting caught walking around with an ax, we successfully transported it with us to Josh's house and back.

Filming went smoothly - we used my DSLR camera, a Sony Cybershot HX300. This gave us the good quality footage we wanted, shooting in 720p.
We constructed a fake door out of scrap cardboard that Josh had in his house, and taped it to a door frame - this was the only fairly difficult shot to get, as the door frame we used was in an extremely tight space, so trying to get the exact shot proved a challenge. However, we managed to get a good replication and used our original shot in the video.
During filming we referred to our screenshots in order to make sure we were filming from the right angles.

We filmed in four rooms of Josh's house and in his hallway - the hallway shot had to be flipped in order to look the same as the original video. We filmed in the gaming room (for the ax/door shot), living room, the kitchen and the bathroom.

Post-production went fairly smoothly, with my main role being to edit with Jess and Josh's assistance. Editing on Adobe Premiere Pro is something I'm reasonably comfortable with, so I was able to make the video to look how we needed it to mostly just by using the colour balance tool, adjusting and heightening the green highlight balance and image contrast.

My strength throughout this task was filming - I filmed all the scenes that I didn't feature in, and I am pleased with how they turned out, as I feel they look almost exact to the original shots of Wolf Alice's video, despite our limitations in terms of set and location.
Another strength was editing - while ediitng was slightly challenging as our video contains a lot of cuts, I like how the whole sequence turned out. Josh helped me with the "You're A Germ" title, and both him and Jess helped me edit throughout.
However, there are a few things I would change if given the chance - there are a few shots which could be slowed down in order to make the actors actions match those of the original video, and overall the colours could be brighter.

As a whole, I am extremely satisfied with the production and finalisation of this prelim task. Our group worked well as a unit, with everyone bringing forward good ideas, and contributed to the final product.

Prelim - Final

This is our finished prelim, a recreation of the first thirty seconds of Wolf Alice's music video for their song "You're A Germ". It was extremely fun to make and challenged us all as media students in terms of new filming and editing techniques.

Prelim Production Diary

My group consisted of myself (Lucy Hocart), Jess Prentice and Josh Yates.

26.6.17 - In this lesson we were put into our groups. While we each had a number of song suggestions, we were able to decide fairly quickly that we wanted to replicate the first thirty seconds of the video for "You're A Germ" by Wolf Alice. We decided on this song as the video looked quite easy to recreate, simply being set in various rooms of a house.

28.6.17 During this lesson we researched how to recreate a certain shot and planned out our costumes and who would be in the video - we asked some classmates to help us film and act in the video.

29.6.17 - After school, me, Jess, Josh and various other classmates went back to Josh's house to film the video, using my DSLR camera. We asked two of our classmates, Jamie Hewlett to play the axe murderer, and Antonio Campoccio to play one of the band members, as the three of us would not have been enough to play everyone. We successfully filmed everything we needed.

30.6.17 - In this lesson we uploaded our footage to the computer and began editing - while a couple of shots were slightly out of time, most were very in-sync with the original video.

3.7.17 - We continued editing in this lesson. Luckily, we had all the footage we needed and did not have to re-film anything.

4.7.17 - This lesson was spent editing and updating our blogs - we also used Photoshop during this lesson to create the title needed for our video. 

7.7.17 We completed editing, which mainly involved colour correction and simple cuts, then exported our video and posted it to Jess's YouTube channel.

Prelim prop list

List of props used in our prelim
- Axe
- Bandages
- Fake blood
- Cardboard door
- Wine glasses
- Old telephone

Carol Vernallis - Music Video Theoy

Carol Vernallis is known for her theory based on music video editing. The 4 key concepts she discusses are:
Narrative
Editing
Camera movement/framing
Diegesis

Narrative - Vernallis suggests that the music video is a visual response the narrative of the lyrics. However, the narrative may not always be completed and can be partial/disjointed.
Some videos may display the theme/narrative in a montage.

 Editing - The video may disrupt or break the conventions of continuity editing. The editing may be brought to the foreground of the video through the usage of graphic matches, jump cuts and cutting with the beat of the song.

Camera movement/framing - There must be important establishing shots and the camera should move in time with the beat/lyrics. It is also important that there are close-ups of the artist/star of the video.

Diegesis - This is the setting of the video, which can be revealed slowly through imagery, camera angles and sound separate to the song. Repetition is key here in order to fully establish the setting.